I like to go out on alimb on the grounds that I have no reputation to protect, save that of going out on a limb.
I self-identify as being an engineer, which is why I think of cliology as being about engineering: that of engineering culture. I can almost hear the squeels and snarles from other communities of academics, humanities scholars, scientists, politicos, and yes, even engineers “Culural engineering cant be done and shouldnt be done!”
True, but I dont care; I think that the proof that something can be done is to do it. Some backstory may assist in orientation: yes this is a rant. Im from a working class background and still live in the north of England’s aftermath of the industrial revolution (where we are still good at hitting lumps of metal). These biographical antecedents affect my thinking. I dont feel happy with just theorising, nor purely studying, however important, rigorous or scientific. I want to roll my sleaves up and do something practical, make tools and use those tools to make stuff (or demolish it), even if my impatience means foregoing all the scholarly rigour. I started in hardware electronics and computing so MSc & PhD came as a shock. I just didnt get the idea of study for its own sake and in the abscence of wanting to build stuff with that knowledge.
Ok, I get it a bit more now; I suppose that is the learning outcome. I kind of get academia, but engineering – the compulsion to use knowlege is in my blood. I guess I’m a pracademic if there was such a thing. Snobbery is rife, but I also think that I understand the divisions a little bit more as well. I inherited the attitude that academia produced “useless knowledge” and that useless meant of no value – its a working class trope that validates those who are socially precluded from the privilagevof a university education.
Really, “useless knowlege” is simply that which no one has figured out how to make it widely useful. Its more to do with specialisms at technology readymess levels. From contenemtal philosophers to entrepreneaurs. From early adopters, to chrossing the chasm, to mainstream. It is not in the pure scientists skill set to exploit their work. I believe they truly want to change the world for the better, however incrementally, but knowledge transfer of a basic discovery into a world changing sucess is not their forte. The specialist moves onto their next challenge, leaving the implementation details to those with that expertise. Investment factors leave most ideas dormant in journals.
Lets push the envelope here. As engineer I want to figure out how to use stuff – whatever it is. I want know how to use Tailhard de Chardan’s noosphere, as a computer so powerful even Douglas Adam’s Deep thaught was not worthy to consider the perameters of. A thought, just a thought.
But lets reign it in to the comparitively plausible.
The point goes back to the distntion between explanandum and explanans. A distinction which could well do with becoming more popular. Explanandum can be thought of as what we observe. Explanans as our considered reasons for such. Seemingly, it is a relationship of one-to-many that is, there are many competing theories to explain a phenomenon. Sometimes these are a matter of opinion, favour of taste, or credo consolans. In the western thinkings though, only a single explanation can be acceptable, and the breath expended arguing which one it will be has contributed significantly to global warming. Philosophers and scientists strive for the truth and to be right (lawyers just want to win), but knowing why something is academically doesn’t necessarily translate into practicality. We can still get results even if our theory is completly wrong; we can still be stuck even if we have a full understanding. Theory and practice are seperate concerns, but they are not partitions, when they both come together they can be dynamite (as Alfred Nobel would testify).
I wont steriotype individuals here as a person can put on many thinking hats. Rahter, we can think of roles, whereby some hyper-specialist may identify with one role, while a polymath may be a butterfly of many. The philosopher and pure scientist roles are there to study and argue why something is, about variables and cause and effect. That is their forte, and even if they, as humans dream that one day their perochial arena may have world changing consequences, speculating on such matters is not in the job description and should be left to experts in knowledge transfer. At some hyperthetical extremity of the other end of the spectrum, technicians and mechanics are concered with applying a known formula and getting the intended results. A deep understanding can be a distraction from the doing, and there is no essential reason to know why something works if an action gets the desired outcome. Much of work-a-day life is like that. I don’t really care about the complexities of digital banking to operate a cash machine; I just want to punch in my PIN and have it spit out my wonga so I can go and spend it. For all I know or care there could be armies of lepreuchorns running around behind the screen, though I rather suspect it all has something to do with computers. Indeed, this is object oriented principle of encapsulation, which both shield the user from the intricacies of the system, and protects the system from cyber-attack and ideots. A theatre production is a good metaphor: stage hands, technicians, directors and many unsung heros running around behind the scenes, all to give the audience a seemless illusion that portrays the narrative.
Most roles, and most people, are, of course, somewhere between the extremities of ivory tower philosophy and robotic instruction following. While it matters little to me how an ATM works providing I get my cash, mysteries are a somewhat disconcerting, and having some plausable explanation is consoling – whether I am actually right, or utterly wrong, and don’t know it. Being utterly wrong about such things has no bearing on my actions and results, which kind of reinforces my sense of being right (and this Dunning-Kruger effect can lead to many pointless arguments).
Repeating a steady result requires routine not theory. For purely practical purposes in such cases, theory is at best simply interesting. The marrage of theory and practice comes into play when we want to achieve different, preferably better, results. Cultural evolution does have a mode whereby incremental happy accidents, upside misses, can be the drivers of variation. For humans, as intellegent agents and artificers, a theory can be the model for change, or in some cases, impede progress. Consider the observation of a phenomenon, which is subsequently employed in obtaining a desired result. We can invent an explanans (a hypothesis), and still get the same desired result whether the explanans is right or wrong. Given that explanans though, we can envisage what might occur if we were to manipulate some parameter, or change the context of the explanans. Building a model of correlation and cause is the job of the scientist – to use the model to hypothesise what might effect what, and evaluate that model against what really occures, thereby accepting or rejecting (and adapting) some theory or other. For the engineer or applied scientist though the aim is not about accepting or rejecting a theory, but rather to envisage where that theory might lead to better results than traditional routines confer. To this end, a fitting theory becomes beneficial, and the more accurate the theory, the better it is for engineering objectives. Hence, we have a relationship between pure and applied science. The philosophy of science, of scrutinising natural phenomena, is established as methodology. Unfortunatly, there is no well distributed philosophy of engineering; I would suggest that there needs to be one. A profound need for such a philosophy of engineering is where the the explanandum is rejected based on the explanans; alternativly, to mis-paraphrase Einstein, if the facts do not fit the theory, so much worse for the facts. A phenomenon is observed and a hypothesis invented, but those who are “overly cleaver” see through the implausability of that explanation, thereby concluding that the phenomenon itself is wrong. Put this way, such reasoning is a classic fallacy, but one which would seem endemic among academics.
Reasoning from theory to practice, as applied science does, would suggest consequent errors in practice – the pracitce would be invalid. So, a routine has historically given reliable results. Some explanation in accordance with the paradigms of the time might have been pro-offered, but as the explanans is neither relevant to operating the routine, nor obtaining the results, then it went unchallenged; the results kept coming as wanted. The paradigm then shifts, philosophical sceptisism supported by scientific evidence and the explanation no longer makes any sense and academics (or rather the extreamist role) which is focused on theory would threfore decry it as popycock, buncome. That previously valid practice would be depricated.
Historically, and in contradiction to the academic ideal and applied science, reasoning ran from practice to theory, practice was proven as relyable so any theory invented to explain its working was irrelevant to the need to obtain results.
We have a clash; one that is caused by directional reasoning where clearly it should be cyclic. Theory and practice should iterate with each other.
As I noted, I self-identify as an engineer and like to go out on a limb. So to cheer on the academics crys of popycock and buncum, and progress my shock rhetoric, let me use the word “occult”. Occult refers to the hidden, and the best plase to hide is in the open. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy proposed a Someone Else’s Problem (SEP) field. It wasn’t that something was invisible or something impossible like that, just that it was someone else’s problem and thereby could be ommitted from perception. Just the word “occult” tends to make overly-cleaver people scoff and switch off and thereby procluding them from seeing what is there – it hides it by turning it into a kind of SEP field.
This is where different roles such as philosopher, scientist and applied scientist differ from engineering (and technologist) and why a philosophy of engineering is sorely needed. Occult, magic and sorcory practices grew out of getting some desired result however effective. The routines were technical concerns, but attracted explanans of the era – summoning angels, deamons and whatnot. Nowadays, gods and devils are out of favour in preference to naturalistic explanans. The older reasoning no longer makes sense, and in the uni-directional approach from theory to practice, would imply that the occult, magic and sorsory are the preserve of the Harry Potter universe. Again, such are just words, but some do have an almost allergic defence to them. But some traditions (and by no means not all) did emerge owing to their utility. Contempory occultists garner benefits in spite of outdated reasoning; they mostly know this, but suspend disbelief in order to get what they want. Discrediting them for want of acceptable terminology or plausable theory is something of a loss. Fortunaly edgy approaches to social-psychology and behavioural science are going some way to recognising and explaining old practice in new terms.
What have been traditionally throught of as mystical practices might now be considered in the light of practical social psychology and related fields. Exorcism, prayre, casting spells are now replaced by psychotherapy, personal development, and social savvy. But the science of psychology remains essentially hostile to the occult, and the much of the “occult” remains hidden in open view, in spite of potential benefits. I have said that sorcderers are essentially technicians. They perform a ritual and get the results because the results are more important than being right about theory. To academics being right about theory is more important than results. But to get different or better results, then a more befitting theory is required. This is the role of the engineer. True, like the technician, the engineer is results driven, but is not after simple duplication but improvements, or is dealing with a novel problem space. New solutions demand a new recipe, and coming up that new recipie requires an understanding of how recipes work.
In that light, here is some admittedly incomplete and not entirelty justified, taxinomy of roles the way I currently see it.
Philosopher
Scientist
Technologist
Technician
Engineer
